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Bain: In the kitchen with Nigella

Nigella is a beauty with balls who doesn’t much care what anybody thinks about her or her food. On this day, the luminescent British cooking goddess is lighting up our drab newsroom, gamely leaning against a navy filing cabinet for a portrait.

Nigella Lawson lights up the Star newsroom during a photo shoot. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Nigella Lawson doesn't even don an apron to cover her Donna Karan dress when cooking her Slut's Spaghetti in the Star's test kitchen. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

After cooking, Nigella rests for a moment on a stool, but grabs Bob Blumer's cookbook Glutton for Pleasure to read. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Nigella is a beauty with balls who doesn’t much care what anybody thinks about her or her food. On this day, the luminescent British cooking goddess is lighting up our drab newsroom, gamely leaning against a navy filing cabinet for a portrait.

She’s so ballsy, in fact, that she has included a recipe called Slut’s Spaghetti in her new cookbook, and agrees to make it in the Star’s test kitchen without the slightest concern its name might raise eyebrows.

“I don’t intend it raunchily and I think people know that,” says Nigella, seemingly perplexed when I ask if anyone has complained about her name for pasta alla puttanesca (whore’s pasta in Italian). “I think of it as slatternly, because it’s something that’s made from tins. And obviously I have a slight weakness for alliteration.”

Rejecting both an apron and disposable cooking gloves, Nigella (who’ll be meeting 200 fans at a sold out Fairmont Royal York dinner in a few hours) gets busy. She doesn’t travel with a knife or any gear. The electric stove throws her for a loop, and she’s battling a cold, but she presses on, calling just two small time-outs for an assistant to touch up her makeup.

Nigella’s new cookbook, her eighth, is Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home, and she has agreed to spend an hour in my mismatched work kitchen with its loud pink walls, black-and-red floor tiles and speckled countertops.

“What a nice, safe, cozy room to work in,” she observes. In her book, she opines that “a kitchen should never look decorated. It just needs to feel lived in.”

“I quite like the sound of I’m With Fatty,” she says, eyeballing stacks of unshelved books on a counter. She plucks out Glutton for Pleasure by Bob Blumer and leafs through it, declaring: “What a wonderful title.”

Her eyes drift upward and settle on a framed story headlined “Welcome to Hogtown,” with a photo of a plastic pig propped inside a peameal sandwich. She’s never heard of peameal. I bet she’d love it.

Nigella’s unabashed hedonism is no act. The buxom journalist-turned-cooking siren has made a fortune telling people How To Eat (1998) and How to be a Domestic Goddess (2000).

Kitchen is littered with the word “greedy.” She confesses that her eating greed spills over to reading greed and a cookery book collection that is hearing 4,000 volumes. She talks about greedily halving a pasta dish meant for six with her husband, the ad mogul Charles Saatchi. She gives “grateful, greedy thanks” to the chef who shared his marrow bone recipe.

“How bad of me to use it (the word greedy) too often,” muses Nigella, who was once deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times. “It’s not a ‘greed is good’ mentality.”

She is charmingly self-deprecating. “I’m a very bad carver,” she observes. Or, at another point in our conversation, “I’m a curious mixture between overactive and lazy.” And then this observation: “I feel I live my life imperfectly.”

Nigella is 50, supposedly an empowering age.

“There’s no denying it,” says Nigella with what could be construed as a testy edge. “It’s nothing. It’s not anything. It does feel odd because, for me, my mother died at 48. I didn’t get to see her grow old.”

She lost her mother, sister and first husband (journalist John Diamond, the father of her children) to cancer.

We chat more easily about her kids, Mimi, 16, and Bruno, 14. Kitchen is loaded with tidbits about them, and Nigella flips to page 53 to show off their photos. Saatchi, her second husband, is rererred to more obliquely, perhaps in deference to his known reclusiveness.

Despite fame and fortune, Nigella is reassuringly normal. She loves leftovers. She nibbles on garlic- and anchovy-infused pasta before a big public event. She saw a Grasshopper Pie on Glee and knew she had to make one. She’s no slave to food trends and you won’t find the flavours of 2010 — whole wheat pasta, brown rice or designer hamburgers — in Kitchen.

“I don’t have to be fashionable. I don’t have to be novel,” declares Nigella.

“I’m not obligated to be original because food isn’t. The point of a recipe is not to say ‘Aren’t I clever?’ but to give people a thought about what they might make for dinner.”

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